Microprocessor History Part III - Surfing the Pipeline

Posted by ttblogger on 01/05 at 12:37 PM Permalink

Maybe I’m showing my long history in California, but when I hear the word pipeline I think of a long wave breaking over its front forming a long pipe. The ultimate hotdogging trick is to surf inside the pipeline. Well, microprocessors grew up in California too. Both Intel and AMD are located in Silicon Valley, and in their products “doin’ the pipeline” is gnarly too.

We are working our way through the history of microprocessors so we can understand what the latest new features are, what gives a performance boost, and what is just marketing hype. The pipeline is a fundamental feature of microprocessors and is the enabler for several other very important speed-up schemes. Let’s see how pipelines work.

Read Full Article Here:
http://www.geeks.com/techtips/2006/techtips-05JAN06.htm

Do you wish to add to this article? Click the “comments” tab below and let your voice be heard!

    Posted by Fred Yontz  on  11/22  at  12:13 PM

  1. In section 10 you said “Finally, we are getting to the ultimate in CPU speedup, superthreading, or as Intel calls it, HyperThreading, or HT. Of course, AMD had to match the acronym, so they call it HyperTransport technology.”

    I beg to differ. AMD’s HyperTransport is not at all the same as Intel’s HyperThreading, which is an internal process on their HT-enabled processors. HyperTransport is the bus structure AMD processors use to communicate with external circuitry, a bidirectional serial/parallel high-bandwidth, low-latency point-to-point link, and is a derivative of the EV bus deveoped by DEC for their Alpha processor. Intel is replacing their front-side bus (FSB) with Quick Path Interconnect (QPI), which is similar to AMD’s HyperTransport. To illustrate that these two forms of ‘HT’ are not the same thing, Intel is providing HyperThreading on some of their new processors that use the HyperTransport-like QPI.

    2. Posted by Raul Zayas  on  11/26  at  04:41 PM

  2. Excellent tech tip. Well written for us less tech types. Thanks.

    3. Page 1 of 1 pages

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